Last week, we covered some of the controversial changes in the latest version of CCleaner 5.45 and its lack of user-privacy options. It appears that user feedback made an impact on Avast / Piriform, as CCleaner 5.45 was pulled from Piriform’s website and reverted back to CCleaner 5.44.

CCleaner 5.45, to explain to those behind the news on this particular story, had removed the option of enabling/disabling user-statistic tracking, which meant the software would always report your usage (and other statistics, possibly) back to the company, and possibly third-party affiliates. On top of that, the “system monitoring” feature was changed so that it would always turn itself on even after users disabled it – effectively meaning that CCLeaner 5.45 always monitored your computer, whether you wanted it to or not.

After pulling CCleaner 5.45 from the Downloads page and reverting it to CCleaner 5.44, the company has said they are working on changes to 5.45 to address users’ concerns, but it will take a few weeks to implement. In an update to its community base, Piriform acknowledged the user complaints regarding privacy, assured everyone that CCleaner is not harvesting personal information, and promised the following changes to be made to CCleaner 5.45 when it is re-released:

We will separate out Active Monitoring (junk cleaning alerts and browser cleaning alerts) and heartbeat (anonymous usage analytics) features in the UI and we will give you the ability to control these individually. You will have the options of enabling all, some or none of these functions, and this functionality will be uniquely controlled from the UI.

We will take this opportunity to rename the Advanced Monitoring features in CCleaner to make their functions clearer.